Democratic heavyweights and lawmakers began publicly questioning Joe Biden’s fitness on Tuesday, as the White House struggled to contain the fire.
“I am hopeful that he will make the difficult and painful decision to step down. I respectfully urge him to do so,” wrote Texas Democratic congressman Lloyd Doggett midday. The congressman is the first to publicly call for the president to throw in the towel.
“I think it’s legitimate to ask whether this is just an episode or a lasting state,” said the very influential Nancy Pelosi, former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, on Joe Biden’s favorite channel, MSNBC.
She is obviously referring to last Thursday’s calamitous debate, in which the 81-year-old Democrat lost ground to his Republican rival Donald Trump.
‘Bounce’
Joe Biden ‘knows how to bounce back’, defended his spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, while ruling out the possibility that the Democratic leader, deemed fit to govern by his doctor in February, would take a cognitive test.
The American president, unable to express himself fluently and vividly during the debate without a teleprompter, will give an interview to ABC News on Friday, which will be broadcast in its entirety on Sunday.
The White House also promises a solo news conference next week at the NATO summit in Washington, and conversations with senior Democratic officials, governors and congressmen.
Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that Joe Biden had a “bad evening” Thursday night, and repeated that he was suffering from a “cold,” while assuring that she herself had not witnessed similar slumps from the president.
Many Democrats no longer believe it.
‘Horrible’
“We have to be honest with ourselves that this was not just a horrible night,” House Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, said Tuesday.
According to a poll published Tuesday by CNN, 75% of voters questioned believe that the party would have a better chance in November with a candidate other than Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is credited with 49% of the voting intentions at the national level, against 43% for his rival, a gap unchanged from the last poll of this type, conducted in April.
Vice President Kamala Harris, without winning, would be better placed, at 45% against 47% for the 78-year-old former Republican president.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that people close to the president have noted “more frequent” and “more pronounced” absences in recent months, alternating with moments of perfect lucidity, for example in the face of international crises.
Questions about the mental acuity of the oldest president in the history of the United States, who has undeniably lost his oral and physical ease, are ‘legitimate’, insisted Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday, even though she did not answer them head-on.
The spokeswoman assured that the American executive was “absolutely not” hiding information about the president’s health.
Hôtel
The change of tone is clear, from a White House which until now has tended to brush aside, barely hiding its annoyance, questions about the president’s age.
For several months now, the American president, who has fallen in public on several occasions, has not used the large gangway of his plane, preferring a shorter and more stable staircase.
For several weeks, he has also surrounded himself with advisers to go from the White House to his helicopter on the lawn, which avoids long camera shots of his very stiff gait.
The US president has not given a long press conference since January 2022 and has reduced the number of impromptu exchanges with journalists.
When Joe Biden recently visited France for the commemorations of the Allied landings of 1944, he went straight from the airport to his hotel, where he remained locked up for a whole day, without any public appearance.
/ATS
